Links to Other Pictographic Writing Systems

Individual Systems

There are two kinds of visual languages: those in which the word for monkey
is a picture of a monkey, and those where it isn't. White-o-glyphics, Signology
and Phonetic Picture Writing fall into the first category. Blissymbolics and
Earth Language fall into the second category.

The first category starts with recognizable illustrations of tangible
objects and expands into abstractions by using metaphors. The second category
begins with abstract concepts and combines these raw elements into words.

The distinction is not absolute. Most visual languages use bits of both
categories.

If they want war then that is what they shall have.

Blissymbolics: Probably the most fully
developed and widespread visual conlang. The gimmick of Bliss is that it
reduces all images to a few simple shapes based entirely on straight lines
(horizontal, vertical and diagonal only), dots, circles (and semicircles),
squiggles and a tiny handful of special shapes (valentines, question marks).
Basic images are then combined into more complex concepts, utilizing reoccuring
patterns.

For example, at left war is constructed from the battle
symbol between two country symbols, each of which is constructed from
the symbol for flag planted in the symbol for earth. The symbol
for if and then are similar, but the question mark has shifted.
Want is feeling+fire.

If you poke through their
animal vocabulary,
you'll see that dog is an animal symbol with an upraised tail,
while wolf is wild+dog, and fox is small+wolf.
Lizard is snake+animal;
crocodile is tooth+water+lizard.

Earth Language
by Yoshiko F. McFarland. Each glyph is a composite of elements that carry parts
of the meaning. For example, in the haiku to the left, notice that the first
and last words, pond and rain, both contain the same graphic of
a droplet, meaning water.

Elephant's
Memory: by Timothy Ingen Housz. "A
pictorial
language consisting of more than a hundred and a fifty combinable graphic
elements (pictograms and ideograms). The system presents a playful learning
environment oriented primarily towards children, and provides an explorational
tool enabling new approaches to the concept of language."

A man went to a city.

IconText by Colin Beardon. "A visual language
which allows authoring of complex messages through use of relations. ``It allows
a message to be read in two distinct ways - as a static hypertextual message
that can be explored at leisure, or as an animation that will reveal the message
as a sequence over time."

Minspeak by Bruce Baker (1980) "A
pictorial language system which can be learnt by children as young as two and
does not require literacy. It offers tremendous advantages in accessing core
vocabulary (those few hundred words that make up 85% of what we say)."

The sun is low over smooth water, a sailing-ship is near a palm island.

Phonetic Picture-Writing by Leonhard Heinzmann. "Picture-writing
also can be read phonetically, for its ideograms (picture symbols) are composed
of special letters."

MUSLI:
"Makes use of a broad range of media like computer graphics (2D and 3D),
audio clips, speech, photographs, and animations. Because of their dynamic
nature MUSLI documents are often referred to as movies. Users have the ability
to stop the movie anytime, display additional information, start, rewind, fast
forward, review, and resume at will."

don't read sad books in bed.

Interscript:
by Edwin Michael Wheeler. "Interscript is a purely visual communication
system based on symbols and independent of any particular language. It covers
the most frequent concepts in general use and combines the principles of
hieroglyphs with conventions established in modern Highway, Safety and Tourist
Codes."

In those days, I ate in the restaurant.

Signology:
by Juan Garay. "Signology is the art of writing with pictures. If
pictures were suitable only to represent concrete things their scope would be
very limited. But this is not the case. Pictures can be used to represent verbs
and abstract concepts and therefore a whole language can be built on pictures."

This is probably the most natural visual conlang on the Web. If an
illiterate English-speaking community tried to cobble together a complete
graphic system of writing from scratch, this is probably what they'd come up
with -- an easy hand-drawn illustration of every word.

Universal
Picture Language by Wally Flint. "A language of pictures
having expressive power nearly equal to that of natural languages. The main
purpose of UPL is to generate new ideas for improving other picture languages
that are currently used to help people who have certain kinds of language
disabilities."

It is not tied directly to a natural spoken language. Instead of strictly
translating the English sentence as [definite] [chicken] [became] [more] [big],
UPL creates two related statements: "An object went from small to large"
and "That object is a chicken."

peaches

insect

person

Yingzi:
by Mark Rosenfelder. "If English was written like Chinese." Not
really a viable language; it's more of an alternate history that teaches the
basic concepts of written Chinese.